Welcome to the next room in Home Sweet Home: The Hallway!
Read each of the rooms below (links updated as I post):
- The original Home Sweet Home post
- Welcome to our Home Sweet Home
- The Living Room
- The Kitchen
- The Hallway
- The Bathroom
- The Laundry
- James’ Area
- Violet’s Vanity Area
- The Bedroom
- What have we learned?
Before and after:
Just like the rest of the apartment, it’s light and airy. It’s amazing what a little paint and paper can do!
This is what our hallway used to look like. It was basically a dumping ground for things which didn’t have another home. The craft area was particularly bad because every time someone offered me some kind of supplies I would just dump them there on top and not even think about it. The other problem area was the shoe rack which was never neat.
Photo spam:
The bathroom door is covered with mirrors in our colour scheme. I’m planning to add more to it too.
My shoe rack is organised and themed. The pretty paper makes it so much brighter, I love it! Now I just need to limit myself to not getting any more shoes… as if that’s going to happen >_<
Sneaker obsession partially survived my shoe cull:
Things now actually have their own places in the craft area. Again the lighter shelves make it easier to find things.
My absolute favorite part of the craft area is Quinn my mannequin. She was a gift and she makes everything so much easier to sew and display!
She looks super pretty when she’s doing it too!
My drawing and painting supplies are organised (no more empty pens that I keep because they’re pretty) and seeing them so often makes me want to use them.
All of the smaller craft supplies are organised in little containers so if I want to use them I can just take that container elsewhere then bring it back.
Over the other side the glass panels are decorated with James’ photography. There are only small prints there at the moment but I would love to get some really big ones. I also painted and added leaves to the tree here. I am changing the leaves every season so in Autumn they’ll be orange etc, it’s a silly thing but it’s a really fun way to mark the seasons 😀
Background information:
The hallway in our apartment is quite wide and unfortunately it takes up a lot of space which would be better used as living space. It’s an odd width because these buildings used to be offices a long time ago and were only cut into apartments later. The apartments are quite small and don’t have a huge amount of storage space so we had to add in a lot more shelves. I think keeping this are nice looking wasn’t actually that difficult, it just takes a little bit of self control and making sure I put stuff away straight away rather than dumping it and doing it *later*. When I tell myself I’m going to do it later, later never actually comes and we end up with things like the “before” photos XD It’s amazing how much brighter everything looked after I painted and decoupaged the shelves (which was actually James’ idea!). It’s such a little thing but it makes such a big difference! My favorite part of this hallway is the bathroom door which now has the mirror installation. I love the colours that I painted everything and I am planning to get more and more mirrors to hang there until the entire door is covered.
Changes made:
- Shoes organised and cut to a reasonable number
- Shoe rack decoupaged with nice paper
- Clothes drying rack reorganised
- Craft shelves painted
- Craft shelves cleaned out and reorganised
- Photo wall fixed up and tree painted
- Mirror wall added
- Removed second clothes rack
Still to be done:
- Not 100% happy with the craft shelves, I’d like to do a little more with them
- Adding more mirrors to the mirror wall
Final thoughts:
I think the hallway is so much brighter these days. It’s function but it’s not cluttered and dark any more. It feels like a hallway that’s leading you somewhere nice rather than towards a hoarder’s house XD
Bonus progress photos:
The shoe rack was reasonably organised though the shoes were spilling everywhere and they weren’t arranged in any particular way.
The craft area went through a lot of different versions as I tried to organise supplies. Really what I needed to do was get rid of the useless things I was hoarding. 
Various shelves on the craft area before they were organised.
Make sure you come back tomorrow for the next instalment: the bathroom!
